


If I Pour Your Cup

by azephirin



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1000-3000 words, 1000-5000 Words, Bisexual Character, F/M, First Kiss, Infidelity, Original Het, POV First Person, POV Original Character, Tea, Teacher-Student, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-28
Updated: 2010-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:52:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A taste, half a spoonful more, then another taste. Guilt. Desire. Tea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Pour Your Cup

**Author's Note:**

> I was going through my hard drive and found this little thing, which I've always oddly liked. It's original hetfic, 1450 words. Title and cut tag from "Cold Tea Blues," by Cowboy Junkies. Copyright © me, 2010.

She puts sugar in her tea, more than I do: one spoon, two, both heaping. A taste, half a spoonful more, then another taste. She deems it satisfactory, and puts down the spoon. I take mine plain.

She drinks her tea and looks at me from above the rim of her teacup. I try to look back but can't. Her brows arch, and her eyes are too intense. I look down and away.

Her feet are bare and her toenails unpainted. Lynn always painted hers red, even in the winter. She'd been doing it since she was sixteen, and the one time I saw her nails bare—she'd taken off one shade of red to switch to another—a dull yellow had sunk into them from the years of polish. It fascinated and disgusted me, how red dye #6 had become a part of my Lynn's body. And now I look at Anna's toes, the translucent white of the nails, as pale as the day of her birth.

She lifts her feet to rest them on the chair across from me. Her feet aren't small—they are probably average for her height—but they are fine-boned, and I can follow their construction from toe to ankle. Maybe they are ticklish, or maybe they would not respond if I traced the line of the bone. I haven't touched Anna. She sits at my counter, drinking my tea, her shoes at the door, and I have not touched her.

"You're quiet, David," she says.

"So are you."

She shrugs. Another smile. Goes back to her tea.

She's wearing a dress. I rarely see her in dresses—shorts or jeans, a sweatshirt over a tank top—but today she's in a green sundress, the narrow straps each tied in a knot at the top of her shoulder so that the dress doesn't fall too low. It's almost more revealing that way—the idea of the untying the knots and exposing what? If I put my hand on her foot, it would make an uninterrupted path all the way up her leg, under the dress.

Her legs are unshaven and the hair looks soft. I have no basis of judgment for this, as Lynn's were always perfectly smooth, but soft is how I imagine that hair, as soft as the hair on Lynn's arms or the nearly imperceptible dusting on her back. I remember noting in France that it seemed less obligatory for a woman to shave her legs, and I wonder if Anna picked up this idea there.

She'll finish her tea and then she'll leave, if I don't say anything. Maybe that's for the best. She should get out of here before I touch her—and possibly that's what she wants, but it's best if I don't. Let master's student Anna, her long dress, her fuzzy legs, and her moon-white toenails, put her sandals on and go back to her apartment and her three roommates and their two cats. If I start this I'll never stop, and I'm older and there's her girlfriend to think of as well as my hope for tenure.

"Cookies go well with tea. I suppose tea biscuits are too much to hope for?"

"No tea biscuits." I get up and rummage through my pantry. It's been a long time since I sorted through here, and there are all sorts of cans—wax beans, stewed tomatoes, compressed chicken—that can go the next time the Boy Scouts come around. There are no tea biscuits for Anna, although there are some graham crackers towards the back. Mr. Sylvester Graham invented them on the theory that eating bland food would quell one's sex drive. Too late.

I set them in front of Anna. "Closest I can get. I make no promises for their age."

She dips into the box with an equally fine-boned hand. No rings, no bracelet, and a tiny nub of bone that protrudes from her wrist. Anna is not overly thin, so it must be a quirk peculiar to her own skeleton. Lynn's wrists were as smooth as stalks.

Anna dips cracker into tea and bites and chews and looks content. It must be an old habit, this dipping and munching. She'll taste like the bite of peppermint tea and the strange sweet blandness of graham. Her skin will be salty, though, because it's warm outside and Anna bikes instead of driving. Her bicycle is, in fact, chained securely outside my building. It has a college sticker on it as well as a rainbow flag. Anna rides it like most people drive SUVs, cutting off other drivers and speeding and passing with apparent disregard for all self-preservation.

So the salt. Warm like ocean water. Her breath that will be at first as regular as waves, and then rougher as though disrupted by wind or quake. She'll taste her own salt on my tongue, but she may not recognize it.

She has breasts, thighs, a belly. The starched linen of the dress does not distinguish between the breasts—frankly, they look like a shelf—but I've seen them in different garments that hug each of the two individuals, seen Anna wearing a shoulder bag that cuts a diagonal pass between them. I am not a man who can venture a guess about such things as cup size, but I know that I have one hand for each of these breasts, and I know that they will fit. Perhaps my hand will cup further around; perhaps part of the breast will spill out. No matter. I am not particular.

It is she who speaks first, and true to form she says nothing like what I might expect her to say. "Are you going to the dean's thing on Tuesday?" she asks.

I find the dean a pompous vulture, and I'd sooner have tea in a garbage dump than attend a party at his house. But a number of my tenure hopes rest on this party, vulture-ridden or not. "Probably," I said.

"Good," says Anna. "At least one person I like will be there."

"Isn't Melanie going?" Melanie. The girlfriend. Tall and narrow, with arms like the wings of a large flightless bird.

"She can't. She has to work."

So much the better, I think.

"Are you bringing anyone?" Anna asks.

"I wouldn't inflict Dean Abichow on anyone but myself."

"Then I'll go with you," Anna decides. "I didn't want to sacrifice any innocents to the dean, either."

I finish my tea and rinse my cup in the sink. "I should get work done," I say, "I still have all those papers from freshman comp to grade."

"What did you have them write about?"

"_Night_, by Elie Wiesel."

The cat smile, an arch of the brow. I keep my hands at my sides so as not to trace the brow with my fingertip. "Should I ask how they are?" Anna says.

"The ones that don't spell his name 'Ellie Weasel' are promising."

Anna's mouth quirks, she takes a last drink of tea, and gets up. I reach to take her mug but instead her hand finds mine. One hand, then the other, and then she arches up and I taste peppermint. She tastes like peppermint and a whole lot of sugar and it's a candy I could eat for the rest of my life. I want to drop her hands and pull her body against mine but I don't. Instead I push her away, gently, and look at her. "We can't do this," I tell her.

Anna Gramerton looks up at me with her agate eyes, layers of brown and green unfolding on top of one another. "Yes, we can," she says. She sounds convinced. Perhaps she is. Anna Gramerton always sounds convinced.

I unfasten her hand from my arm and step out of her reach, though possibly still within mine. "It's a bad idea."

A roll of the geological eyes. "Bad how? Bad because your last name is Hennessey and the guilt is a part of your genetic makeup?" She steps closer. I don't step back. She takes my right hand and places it on her hip, which is one of the places I wanted it all along. Through the dress her skin is warm.

There are reasons upon reasons I should not do this. I have delineated them to myself while showering, eating dinner, waiting for my freshmen to finish an in-class essay, or even occasionally while lecturing. (There are only so many times you can discuss _Adam Bede_ and still pay attention to yourself.) The reasons are good ones and important. But right now I tighten my hand on her hip, and she steps closer, and I am lost.


End file.
